Thursday, May 13, 2010

The Neo-Con Wasteland: Life Without Honor or Trust

MeanMesa has posted before about an interesting but discouraging side of the neo-conservative psychology. Attempts to understand the motivating principles of such, uh, unusually unhappy people leads one to some disturbing conclusions.

We have said before that neo-cons are allergic to leadership. They cannot contenance that scintillating moment when more rational folks take the breathtaking leap of faith to trust the essential character of other humans. Neo-cons cannot abide with the fundamental concept of trusting the character and being of another.

The problem they encounter?

They think everyone is like them.

Naturally, the predictable result of all thoughts conducted under such a dark and frightening cloud of suspicion is a modern political version of Ashieta's "Terror of the Moment." The all-penetrating facts of reality leave no refuge for the man who foolishly demands that events meet his unexamined expectations.

The superficial insistence on such gaseous foundations of ideological purity foisted upon these otherwise reasonable people converts all accommodation of any sort to abject fear. The AM talkers, the unchallenged Senators and the dirty shirt preachers simply continue to "harvest" their grisly political prizes from those they have reduced to a state of continual hysteria, hopelessness and depression.

We see this same tiring script emerge with all the discussions of the President's nominee for the Supreme Court. There is little room left for considering the capability and talent to perform the job. Instead, there arises an almost fanatical demand that the deepest character of the nominee be revealed -- and guaranteed!

The "bolt which has fallen into the gears" is firmly founded on an absolute lack of trust. No nominee will be acceptable absent an perpetual and unchangeable oath to neo-con principles which have yet to be defined.

Oooops. This is getting a little abstract. Let's clarify things with an allegorical equivalent.

Let's say that instead of hiring a new Supreme Court Justice, we are faced with hiring an assembly line worker who will paint cars produced in our factory. Of course our plant produces cars of all colors, and our salesmen insist that, whatever the color, the paint shall be applied to very high standards of quality.

Although we have several applicants for the job, one of them stands out as a car painter with obviously remarkable skill and good work habits. However, in this applicant's interview, we ask if he has a "favorite color."

He answers that, indeed, he does have a favorite color -- say, azure blue.

In our discussion about this applicant later, we decide that we can simply not trust his honor and loyalty because some of the cars we plan to manufacture will be painted crimson. If we are neo-cons who trust no one and, in fact, believe that there is absolutely no one who can be trusted, we have no other choice than to consider a less qualified painter -- one who answered our question by saying that, no, he had "no favorite color, at all."

In the end, we have indulged our suffocating universal cynicism and ended up with a crappy car painter. As our quality plummets and our sales decline, we reap cold comfort from the fact that we have hired such a safe and compliant, although somewhat unskilled, employee.

It is a tale of seriously misplaced priorities.

We see a similar, desperate tactic in full play with the nomination of Elena Kagan. No one -- including our President -- knows with absolute certainty precisely what her ideological slant might be or the degree to which she might "tilt" Supreme Court decisions to reflect such a bias.

We are asked to trust the President's judgement and the nominee's judicial objectivity. Is this such an outrageous expectation?

As MeanMesa visitors and progressives, we have the positive optimism and confidence to take such a step. After all, we have handed the "keys to the kingdom" over to the man in the White House, and with them, an implicit commitment to trust that the decisions and outcomes arising from his judgement will also be honorable.

The undeveloped, puerile tantrum which insists that the threat of possible deception paralyze every opportunity to move ahead with our democracy must be relegated to the whining and whimpering "Sunday School" graduates on the other side. Their lamentations and dire predictions were already penned -- with blanks for the insertion of a name -- before this nomination was even ever made.

The neo-cons not only expect the worst and impose their paranoia on every hill billy and bigot who will listen to their drivel, they seem to be irreconcilably invested in extracting one disaster after another with their insatiable craving for reality without risk. That philosophy is made by "dead men walking."

Such crippling cynicism was never the underpinning of America's great history of success. The tantrums have moved from being simply irritating to being out rightly exhausting. There is, now, clearly no limit to the damage the neo-cons are willing to inflict on our country to achieve their return to power.

Screw them. MeanMesa and most other Americans are totally over their adolescent shenanigans.